


Would You Die For Me?

by heliotrope



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dream Bubble, M/M, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Sadstuck, well more like kind of sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-02
Updated: 2012-04-02
Packaged: 2017-11-02 21:53:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/373737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliotrope/pseuds/heliotrope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's simply not fair that one single stroke of fate can empty two worlds of meaning, of love, of life. And it's even more unfair that that empty world offers no reason at all for him to stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Would You Die For Me?

            “Would you die for me, then?”

            The words are out of his mouth before he knows it, and he clamps his mouth shut viciously before he can say anything more discriminating. The question lingers in the cold night air, faintly drifting between real and unreal. It’s purely rhetorical and Karkat doesn’t expect an answer—doesn’t _want_ an answer—but somehow the query has more substance, more longing, more truth than he had ever meant for it to have. He tried to convince himself that it had sounded appropriately brusque.

            Beside him, John laughed nervously. “That’s a pretty heavy question!” He tilted his head to one side, waiting for a cue from Karkat, but in that hesitation he had already said far more than he ever could with words. The answer was no.

            “No, dumbass, that was a rhetorical question,” he said, rolling his eyes while injecting the proper amount of condescension into his voice. “Of course you wouldn’t. You _can’t_. You’re the fucking windy god, and you have actual shit to do in this universe—in your universe. Unlike me.”

            “That’s not true! You have—had—plenty to do! We couldn’t have won the game without you!”

            “Past tense, retard. ‘Had.’ ‘Couldn’t have won.’ I’m dead now and I can’t do jack shit.”

            John opened his mouth to argue again, but nothing came out this time. With a soft sigh of defeat, he leaned back slowly before folding his hands in his lap and looking down at them. Karkat rolled his eyes again and simply watched as the other boy made little animal shapes with his fingers; he’d learned just that day that it was one of John’s many little nervous habits. Which was odd, seeing as he’d almost never seemed nervous on Pesterchum. It was just another indicator of how little they actually knew of each other, how much they were actually strangers.

            And why on earth, he thought bitterly, would anyone agree to stay in a dream bubble for eternity for the sake of a complete fucking stranger?

            “I wish I had known you longer,” John said wistfully, and Karkat snorted in reply.

            “That would only make this dumb choice even more complicated. You have to go back and be the great glorious fucking windy god of your universe and that’s it.”

            “I don’t _have_ to,” he objected, leaning in closer to Karkat as he talked. “Rose and Dave and Jade would do a good enough job by themselves.” His voice rose in pitch and a faint pink lit his skin—but that could just as easily have been a trick of the moonlight.

            “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the original god tier. You have to be there.” But he couldn’t help it as his vascular pump pulsed just a little bit faster, and a tiny, painful twinge of hope stirred in his chest. He forced it down. “Besides, what, are you going to just leave the rest of your friends in the dust? This isn’t even a serious question, Egbert. You and I both know that you wouldn’t stay here even if Betty Crocker took over your whole damned universe. This isn’t a fucking challenge to see if you can win an argument against me.”

            “I know! I know, but…”

            But John only sighed and drifted off into infuriating silence. The troll cursed himself mentally; where did he even get off hanging onto every single one of the damned human’s words like a love-struck wriggler? Nowhere was where.

            “Is it lonely here?”

            There was a long pause as Karkat considered denying it, considered giving one of his usual sarcastic responses, but the liquid blue eyes that waited for a response were so much more vibrant in person than the viewport had ever suggested, and the words died in his throat. “…sometimes,” he forced out finally with difficulty, and waited.

            “Well, it’s lonely back… back home.” His hands, which had been fidgeting restlessly, stilled. “I know I shouldn’t be lonely because I have everyone there—Rose and Dave and Terezi and all of the other trolls. It’s so much better than it was on the battleship. But then sometimes I open up Pesterchum and expect to see loud gray text yelling at me and it’s never there, and sometimes I just feel empty inside.” He stopped talking for a moment and looked back up at Karkat.

            “That’s not called being lonely, dumbass, that’s called missing me which is normal because I’m dead.”

            “It’s not just that!” He insisted. “I miss Vriska! We were best buddies for a while and it was great, even though she was kind of insane in a weird troll way? And I wanted to see her, but then I found out that she had died and it sucked, but I… but nothing felt _missing._ It’s like you’re part of me and part of me died when you did.”

            “ _Don’t._ We’re complete fucking strangers. Don’t even try to say it like that when you don’t mean it that way.”

            John blinked and bit his lip. “Sorry. Was that a bit creepy? I guess it was a bit creepy. But we’re not strangers! I guess, sure, we’ve never met, but it feels like we’ve met… I always thought we would meet before… before this…” He cleared his throat. “It was just me and Jade and Davesprite on that ship, you know, and sure it was great but sometimes I’d wonder what you guys were doing on the meteor, and I guess I was a bit jealous because you were probably all having such a great time together.

            “But it was always okay because I was going to pull the mother of all pranks on you when we met! And I wanted to ask you what you thought of that bucket we sent you, and laugh at your face when all the sloppy make-outs happened, and show you how great Nic Cage is. We were going to have to most epic pillow fights and amazing food-throwing contests, and I was going to switch all the discs in your movie collection so you wouldn’t know which case had which movie, and you would probably yell at me but I just wanted to see you yelling, I just wanted to see you and—” His voice cracked suddenly, and he quickly cleared his throat.

            “But then you weren’t _there_.”

            Karkat only stared at him, dumbfounded, as he continued talking as if he’d forgotten that Karkat was still listening. “You weren’t there, and I kept waiting for someone to say, ‘Just kidding! Here he is!’ but when I asked and no one would look me in the eye, I thought I was going to throw up because my stomach dropped so fast and… it’s just not fair! Why would they take away the one person I wanted to see most for three whole years?” His already pale fingers curled into a tight fist until the blood had drained out of them, leaving them a ghostly paper white. Slowly, they uncurled again, and Karkat swallowed as he watched the red blood rush back in.

            “It’s been a long time since then.” He said finally, and John nodded.

            “It’s been almost a year.”

            “You’ve gotten over it already.” It wasn’t a question.

            “I probably have.” He lowered his eyes again to stare at his now-red fingers.

            “So what was the point of telling me all of that?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. I waited so long to find your dream bubble, and now I’m here, and… it feels like a dream. It doesn’t feel real at all. I’m talking to you, and I can’t believe it. But… but this is the happiest I’ve been in so long, Karkat. You don’t even know how happy I am right now, so happy it hurts.”

            “I know,” he said simply, and John fell silent.

            “I guess you do know, huh.”

            “So what are you going to do now?” His eyes flickered upwards for a second, but he didn’t let any of his desperate hope trickle into his voice. That just wouldn’t do.

            “I guess… I guess I’ll wake up eventually. I’ll get up in the morning, and I’ll be disoriented because I won’t know where I am for a few minutes with the sun in my eyes. I’ll brush my teeth and then walk downstairs and almost trip over my own feet, and Dave will offer sassy commentary about stairs. And then I’ll eat slightly stale cereal and almost-expired milk before spending hours on my computer aimlessly flicking through websites while being pestered to no end by Rose and Jade. Then after that, we’ll fly around like it’s perfectly normal to be able to fly and do those god tier shenanigans, and I’ll keep waiting for gray text to pop up on my Pesterchum, and it never will.” He paused for a second.

            “No, that’s not right. There’ll be gray text there. UU and uu, I think they were called. We’ve never met them, but they have gray text too—did you know? It’s pretty funny and sometimes one of them will start yelling at me and telling me how much of a screwup I am, and it’ll almost sound like you for a second before something sounds wrong and I realize that it’s not you and it never will be. I always forget. I always forget that I’ll never see you. Even when I’m talking to Dave about college and stuff, I keep thinking, ‘wait until Karkat hears about this!’ And then I… but you won’t.” He stopped to consider that and then laughed just a bit. “Well, I guess you are now, so maybe I was right!”

            “… yeah. Maybe.”

            “I don’t know, Karkat. Maybe I’ll find your dream bubble again.”

            The troll rolled his eyes. “Like hell you will. You were lucky enough to find it this time already. You know you never see the people you want to see most in these dream bubbles.”

            “…yeah.” His voice caught, and he paused to collect his voice again. “If I leave now, I’ll never get back.”

            “You’ll never see me again.”

            “I wonder if I’d stop waiting? If I’d stop expecting to see you?”

            “How would I know, dumbass?”

            “Well, I’d miss you.”

            “No fucking duh.”

            “I wish…”

            The words lingered in the chilly night air, holding far more substance and far more pain than any simple sentence had a right to hold. Warm, slender pink fingers curled around firm grey ones, and for a split second, for the slightest fraction of a moment, it wasn’t cold at all.

            “I wish a lot of things had happened differently,” Karkat finished for him.

            “Yeah.” He sighed and leaned against Karkat’s shoulder tiredly.

            “So where are you going now?”

            “I don’t know, Karkat. I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m tired of waiting for something that will never happen. It’s finally here, and I don’t want to let go.”

            “You can’t possibly be thinking of staying here.”

            “I’m not thinking about it. I’m just going to do it.”

            “You haven’t even told the rest of them about it yet, dumbass!”

            “They’ll understand.”

            “They’ll just ‘understand’ when your body stops moving and you never wake up? You’ll never see them again!”

            “I’ll miss them, but they’ll understand. That’s why they’re my best friends.”

            “Do you even know what you’re trying to do? You’ll be stuck in a suburban wasteland for eternity with no one for company but me. You’ll never be able to go back. You’ll be _dead._ ”

            He only grinned in reply and rested his head against the troll’s shoulder, closing his eyes. “But Karkat, I finally get it now.”

            “Get what, dumbass?” He glared, but the fingers curled around his tightened resolutely.

            “I’d die a million times to be with you.”


End file.
